Remembering the Yorkshire road tragedy that time has forgotten

In a corner of the old North Riding, they remember still the 32 people on a pensioners' party who died that day at Dibble's Bridge. Elsewhere, it is a tragedy that time has forgotten.
The Dibble's Bridge coach crash, near Pateley Bridge, in 1975.The Dibble's Bridge coach crash, near Pateley Bridge, in 1975.
The Dibble's Bridge coach crash, near Pateley Bridge, in 1975.

It was exactly 43 years ago, on the steep Dales road between Pateley Bridge and Grassington, where they were all headed for afternoon tea, that the brakes failed on the Bedford coach they were in, and it began a precipitous descent down a 1:6 gradient.

At the narrow, right-hand bend just before the bridge, it went through a steel barrier and a three-foot stone parapet and landed 17ft below, on its roof, in a garden on the bank of the River Dibb.

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Today, the scenes of tragedies are turned overnight into roadside shrines. But this was the worst road accident Britain had seen, and remains so – yet nothing there commemorates it.

There is nothing either to remember the seven local government workers who had died in similar circumstances, and at the same spot, 50 years earlier.

It is an oversight that in Thornaby-on-Tees, a royal charter town just south west of Middlesbrough, they have resolved to remedy.

The victims of the 1975 crash had come from there. Each one had paid £2 for their day in the Dales.

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“You can imagine the impact a disaster like that had on a close-knit community,” says Steve Walmsley, chairman of the town council at Thornaby.

“It was absolutely massive – a national tragedy. Everybody was just trudging around the town in a state of shock.”

It had been the Tuesday after the Spring Bank Holiday that the pensioners were picked up from the terraces of Lane House Road by Roger Marriott, a stand-in driver for the local family firm of Riley’s Luxury Coaches. He took them first to Ripon and then to Knaresborough, before setting off on the next, fateful leg towards Dibble’s Bridge

His last words were to Elsie Townsend, a passenger in a car that followed the coach down the hill.

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She had taken off his tie and loosened his shirt to try to make him more comfortable as he lay in the wreckage.

“I had a bit of trouble with the gears and the brakes failed,” he told her. He died before the Fire Service was able to cut him free.

As he spoke, the other victims were being laid out in body bags among the flowers of the cottage garden in which the coach had come to rest.

They included a former Mayoress of Thornaby, 62-year-old widow Dorothy White, who had organised the outing and others like it. Auntie Dorrie’s Mystery Trips, she called them.

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Help had arrived after a series of 999 calls had conveyed piecemeal what information there was. Just a single ambulance turned up at first, and no-one at Airedale Hospital was aware of the scale of the incident.

The first rescuer on the scene had been the sculptor Lincoln Seligman, then a young barrister, who was a relative of the cottage owners and had been staying there over the Bank Holiday.

“There were screams. I dragged some people out. I don’t know how many,” he told reporters at the time.

Mr Seligman was the godson of Sir Edward Heath, who had been Leader of the Opposition until three months earlier.

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The crash was survived by 13 of the pensioners on board. They, and nearly 1,000 others, squeezed into a memorial service at Thornaby Methodist Church, to pay their respects. A disaster fund set up by the Mayor of Stockton raised thousands.

It took experts several weeks to confirm what Mr Marriott had said in the first place: the brakes had failed. At Skipton Magistrates’ Court, Norman Riley, the owner of the coach, pleaded guilty to using a vehicle on which the braking system was not properly maintained. He was fined £75.

Today, it is not blame but observance that drives those in Thornaby.

The council has set aside money for a permanent memorial, which it wants to place near the scene of the disaster.

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“We’re looking at making it out of stone from the local quarry,” says Mr Walmsley.

It has also commissioned Derek Smith, a documentary film maker who used to work for ITV and the BBC, to interview a handful of survivors and witnesses for a video that will form part of an exhibition in Thornaby’s long derelict but soon to be restored Victorian Town Hall.

“It’s quite strange that this major national event doesn’t have a memorial – not just to those from Thornaby but to the victims of the earlier crash,” Mr Smith says.

“That one was in exactly the same location and it was brake failure again. We’re hoping that there will be identical monuments at Dibble’s Bridge and in Thornaby.”

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It is important to get them commissioned, he says, before the tragedy fades from the collective local memory.

“You talk to the younger generation and they’ve never heard of Dibble’s Bridge. And apart from the two world wars, this is the event that’s had the most significant impact on the town.

“Even 40 years on, it’s still painful for some people to talk about.”

Mr Smith, himself a native of the town, had been home from college in London at the time of the accident.

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“I could see myself the impact it had on the place,” he says.

“Because it was so close-knit there was a natural support network. That’s what helped bring them through.”

The casualties were not confined to those who had been on board. Mr Smith knew the Riley family and recalls the toll it took on them.

“Mr Riley himself was under sedation for a long time,” he recalls.

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“But nobody was looking for someone to take the blame. The world was a lot gentler in 1975.

“It would be a very different story today– people would be looking for heads.”

The trauma also affected many of those who found themselves caught up in the rescue operation.

Three teenagers from Hull, who had been camping 20 yards from the crash site, were quickly on the scene and were hailed at the time as “unsung heroes”.

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Steve Griffin, Steve Jennison and Carl Dickinson remained friends and came together again in front of Mr Smith’s camera. Mr Griffin, who became a bus driver, said a positive effect of the tragedy had been to improve the safety of coaches by fitting electromagnetic retarders as an auxiliary braking system.

An inquest jury returned verdicts of accidental death on the victims. The Craven coroner, James Turnbull, summed up the enormity of what had happened.

“This has been described as Britain’s worst motor disaster,” he said. “If it is true, let us all hope that it always retains that title.”